more on Derrida’s “realism”

Every effort I’ve seen so far to claim that Derrida is a realist simply hinges upon redefining the term “realism” to mean exactly the opposite of what it has always meant. Fine, you can always redefine a term if there’s a good reason for it. But in my view the wish to confuse a genuine debate is not a good reason.

Here, for example, is the final paragraph of Marder’s Parrhesia article “Difference of the ‘Real'” (and the scare quotes around ‘real’ already say a lot):

“Derrida’s own deconstructive or post-deconstructive realism is, certainly, not the same as ‘any of the tradition’s realisms,’ be they empirical or transcendental, since at its core we find the split thing, the indwelling of différance, the concrete figure without figure undermining and invalidating the logical principle of identity. The thing is not the same thing as what or who it is. Its non-identity with itself renders it interchangeable with any other thing and with the other of the thing (the athing); its absolute alterity does not allow the new realism to ossify in a determinate, cataloged definition, but necessitates its unfolding as a series of discontinuous beginnings and interim, provisional conjectures. For, those who follow it are seduced and diverted away from it, while those who resist it are unwittingly drawn into its tight embrace.”

What is noteworthy about Marder’s reading of Derrida is that, as far as I can tell, it’s not an especially surprising reading of Derrida. The Derrida he portrays is more or less the Derrida we’ve always known about. He’s not saying something like “contrary to all previous readings, Derrida is actually a realist.” He is not posing any new challenge to Derrida studies. Instead, he’s simply trying to redefine the term realism so that the word is no longer a potential rival lying outside the Derridean intellectual sphere. It’s an enlargement of the Derridean vocabulary, not an overturning of traditional Derridean ideas.

This helps explain the otherwise paradoxical fact that the “Derrida is a realist” crew aims all its barbs at SR, and never has a single harsh word about mainstream Derrideans for having misread Derrida’s supposedly realist intentions. The reason for this is that they don’t really have a problem with mainstream readings of Derrida. Their target is not stuffy, oppressive, first-generation Derrideans in the way that my own target was stuffy, oppressive, first-generation Heideggerians. Instead, their target is non-Derrideans. They simply want to steal the word “realism” and claim that Derrida was already there. Stated differently, they’re not bothered by past misreadings of Derrida as an anti-realist (at bottom they agree with those readings), they’re simply angry that anyone is claiming that “realism” is something lying outside the Derridean orbit that might be used to attack him. This explains the violence of their reactions to SR combined with their (as far as I can tell) complete lack of anger at any Derridean who doesn’t call Derrida a realist. If Derrida were actually a realist, they ought to be annoyed at the decades of Derrida scholarship that said just the opposite, but I see no trace of annoyance whatsoever.

This phrase in particular is about as far from realism as one can get: “Its non-identity with itself renders it interchangeable with any other thing and with the other of the thing (the athing)…”

I’m trying my best not to be polemical here. But there’s a bad habit that one often finds among Derrideans (not to mention Derrida himself). Instead of saying that their opponents are wrong, they try to defang and digest their opponents in advance by insinuating that it’s impossible to disagree with Derrida, because one’s words can always be reversed into a new ratification of Derrida’s own philosophy. “Realism” is becoming the latest target of this tiresome tactic.

In fact, I would say the opposite of what Marder says above: “The object’s identity with itself renders it non-interchangeable with any other thing or with the other of the thing…” Now that’s realism! Disagree with it if you wish, but at least it is exactly what it claims to be.

In the passage from Marder above we also find Derrida’s trademark conflation of ontological and epistemological realism (every one of his writings is saturated with this terrible mistake). Namely: “its absolute alterity does not allow the new realism to ossify in a determinate, cataloged definition…” But the question of whether something can be given a determinate definition has nothing to do with whether or not it is independently real and self-identical. Quite the contrary. Even Aristotle said in the Metaphysics that a substance cannot be defined, since definitions are made of universals but things are not.

As for Derrida’s style (by which Marder is heavily influenced) this is precisely what I dislike about it. A good crisp style is one that says: “Here is what I think, and here are a few traces of what my opponents think and why I can’t adopt their position.” When people write like that, you get a good sense of the debate that’s going on and can try to figure out what you yourself as a reader think. You can even go read the opposing positions to hear the other side of the story.

But in Derrida’s case, although he takes numerous needling shots, often in parentheses, at the supposed naiveté of those with whom he disagrees, in stylistic terms he ends up blurring those disagreements as much as he can get away with. To use a pop psychology term, Derrida as a writer has “boundary issues.” I suppose you could always try to salute this as a magnificent embodiment of his philosophical views, in which there is no origin but the trace is always the origin of the origin, etc. But for the most part it simply leads to poor writing that obscures the true fault-lines of any debate. I’ve been critical of the typical writing style of analytic philosophy for its overcommitment to clarity at the expense of vividness, but I have a hard time seeing Derrida as either vivid or clear, and most of the time would prefer to read an analytic philosopher.

Which is not to say that I think Derrida is insignificant, let alone a “charlatan” or any other such term. He does offer one interesting possible position that one might take in the post-Heideggerian world. I’m just making two complaints about it: (1) It’s the wrong way to go, and (2) It’s often miserably explicated.

One of my former professors had the interesting idea that the history of philosophy is now beginning to repeat itself cyclically. Hegel is the new Hesiod, summing up all the old gods at their moment of disappearance. Heidegger is Parmenides. I think it’s a powerful model, and other possible parallels are easy to come by once you adopt it (Heraclitus-Bergson, Nietzsche-Empedocles, even Leo Strauss-Xenophon). I used to think of Derrida as Zeno under this model, but more and more I think of him as a modified version of Anaxagoras. If Aristotle were alive today, his criticisms of Derrida would be similar to those he made of Anaxagoras: the same thing cannot be a trireme, a wall, and a man simultaneously, etc.

I won’t criticize Derrida’s reading of Heidegger too much, since I’m probably just as guilty of going beyond the letter of what Heidegger actually says. But the idea that being is not a “transcendental signified” but merely an immanent effacement within the historical play of signifiers seems completely un-Heideggerian in spirit. And in any case, it refutes the claim that Derrida is any sort of “realist.”

However, I’ve found that debates of this sort rarely go anywhere, because Derrideans generally refuse to admit that there is any outside to Derrida at all. They’re too often unwilling to stick with a thesis and let you have a contrary thesis. They won’t let you be a realist in opposition to Derrida, but will simply try to twist the meaning of the word “realism” so that Derrida incorporates it in advance. They will try to change any philosophical debate into a debate over whether you are understanding Derrida properly. If you point to specific references, they will pull different references from a more obscure Derridean text that they think you haven’t read. The moment of possible disagreement about the world will be forever postponed.

I realize that there are many knee-jerk “vulgar realist” critiques of Derrida out there. But I also think it’s deeply important for continental philosophy to admit that Derrida is saying something specific and definite, and once that happens we will finally be able to entertain the possibility that Derrida happens to be on the wrong track. At least the emergence of Deleuze and Badiou has changed the subject for awhile, and that’s brought some fresh air into what had become a horribly suffocating atmosphere by the early 1990’s.

Even the most realist-sounding terms that appear in Derrida (concealment, reserve, otherness) end up having an anti-realist sense. Derrida is fundamentally committed to the non-existence of a “transcendental signified” (an overly technical way of saying “something real beyond the play of signs”). And given that commitment, he has no choice but to place concealment, reserve, and otherness elsewhere than in the depths of reality. For Derrida, there are no such depths. In fact, I’m increasingly inclined to see him as an heir of Husserl rather than of Heidegger.

An object is not difference. (And here I may disagree with some of my OOO comrades.) An object is what resists any articulation in terms of difference, and precisely for this reason it is the only thing that can resist “logocentric oppression,” which Derrida locates in the real when it actually belongs to the logos.